Introduction

Mathematica is uniquely suited for processing symbolic expressions because of its powerful pattern-matching abilities and its large collection of built-in structural manipulation functions. This section provides a few examples to illustrate the use of Mathematica for processing XML data.

When you import an arbitrary XML document into Mathematica, it is automatically converted into a SymbolicXML expression. SymbolicXML is the format used for representing XML documents in Mathematica syntax. The conversion to SymbolicXML translates the XML document into a Mathematica expression, while preserving its structure. The advantage of converting XML data into SymbolicXML is that you can directly manipulate SymbolicXML using any of Mathematica's built-in functions.

The following command converts an XML string into a SymbolicXML expression.

In[1]:=

Out[1]=

Here we use a simple transformation rule to remove the unwanted "red" element from the list.

In[2]:=

Out[2]=

You can use ExportString to convert SymbolicXML into native XML syntax, which was designed to be easy to read.

In[3]:=

Out[3]=